


Variance

by Major



Category: The Flash (TV 2014)
Genre: Friendship, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-10
Updated: 2016-12-10
Packaged: 2018-09-07 17:14:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,329
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8809243
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Major/pseuds/Major
Summary: No friendship is an accident.





	

**Author's Note:**

> The summary is an O. Henry quote.

Cisco stared at Caitlin’s snack of choice across from her at the table in the food court, digging through the filing system in his mind that he kept for her. That cabinet held vital files: Killer Frost powers (labeled with a red flag and the words ‘Not Cool’), hammered heart (both Ronnie and Jay had missed the Happily Ever After mark in spectacular fashion), and - what he considered most important of all - available to share a bucket of buttered popcorn when a new Arnold Schwarzenegger movie came out. Which Arnold Schwarzenegger movie? All of them. He was wasted in politics.

She winced through her third bite, and he couldn’t take it anymore.

"You hate raisins,” he said at last, because there was no file to justify the bag of wrinkled purple grossness she was eating and this required an immediate explanation. “Are you ill? Should I get a crash cart ready?”

“I am trying to hate less things,” she replied, like that made any sense at all. Hating things was half the fun of things existing, especially when someone else was there to hate the thing in solidarity with you. Raisins sucked. They were supposed to defeat its evil together. It was a hard betrayal to take. “When you hate less, your soul weighs less. You’re freer.”

“What garbage is that? Are you possessed by Tony Robbins?”

“Tony Robbins is alive.”

“Are you sleeping with Tony Robbins and repeating pillow talk?”

She pulled a book from her purse and slid it over the table to him. It was even worse than he thought, _Transforming Your Inner Light: From an Ember to a Flame_ by some guy who probably made gullible clients dance around a bust of himself inside a sweat lodge in the hippiest bowels of Joshua Tree.

“No. No, no, no.” He flipped the book over, shaking his head. “Self-help books are for people who need help with their selves. You have a good self. Don’t damage your selfness with this babble.”

“I don’t think it’s babble. I think it’s helping me.” She put it back in her purse. “I could use some help. You know. So I don’t turn evil again.”

“You were barely evil!” he dismissed. Hardly counted. That kind of thing had to be sustained to be worth noting. “Not even a footnote in the Caitlin Snow story.”

“Julian would probably disagree. And Barry. And you, when you’re being honest.”

“Honesty is overrated.”

It was time for a change of subject before things got too deep. They were supposed to be having a chill evening to forget all the crap going on. He waggled his eyebrows to get that wary look out of her that amused him so much. "Wanna talk about boys?"

"No."

He scanned the food court for someone to draft for Caitlin's fantasy wedding, in which he would be best man and steal the bouquet to toss to Jesse just to watch Wally squirm into the floor. During her last fantasy wedding game, he informed her of his plans to organize a bachelorette party in Vegas ("No.") at a show that specialized in _Magic Mike_ reenactments ("No.") and planned to search Earths 2-100 to find a less famous Channing Tatum that would be amenable to coming back with him after a fair payment to escort Caitlin around her party ("Cisco! That's— ...actually kind of brilliant.").

He found someone appropriately inappropriate and pointed over to the man standing in line at the cheesecake stand. "Look at that guy over there. He's wearing a bolo tie. He's for you. It's fate. He has a Casio calculator watch. I want to spend Thanksgivings with him. We need to usurp him into our family."

He heard him talking to his wife earlier when he was behind them in line for a pretzel. She asked how his day was, and he turned the next ten minutes in line into a temptation for Cisco's brain to escape his skull and flee. He now knew that the man worked in a factory threading string through the holes at the top of bookmarks; he also now knew that describing the minutiae of bookmark threading could be stretched into an eternal stream of unjustified enthusiasm, interrupted only by the pretzel dude asking for his order.

He would bet cash money that he was always that boring, but not a boring kind of boring, an advanced top tier level of dull that made normal boring people look like a bomb juggling act. He could weaponize that kind of mind numbing dullness against his enemies. Or his friends when he had nothing better to do than watch them awkwardly try to extract themselves from a torturous conversation. Caitlin had to take this bullet for him.

"I'm going to invite him to sit with us," he teased.

"I will walk out of here."

He believed her. "A Snowless Schwarzenegger movie? That's worse than a snowless Christmas."

"Is it?"

"Who would poke me in the ribs when I got too loud trying to copy everything he says?" He couldn't help it. He was hardwired to impersonate him upon exposure. "You leave me in there unmuzzled, and it will be anarchy."

"You do require a mute button."

"A rib jabber, exactly!"

"I'll jab your ribs," she vowed.

"I won't marry you off to Bolo."

"I'm still holding out for Earth-87 Channing Tatum," she joked as they got up to dump their trash and make their way to the movie theater in the mall.

"For your next birthday," he promised. "Wearing a calculator watch. And nothing else."

The movie was great, not necessarily in objective quality but in amazing CGI action sequences that made his head explode at the ridiculous scale of them. Arnold said stuff, but the lines didn't matter. It was all secondary to him being badass. He got poked twice but not for talking: once after jumping hard when a semi wrecked into the wall of a bank and startled him into spilling popcorn all over Caitlin's lap, and again for punching Caitlin's arm at the sight of a Volkswagen Beetle getting passed by the car Arnold was speeding through the streets in.

They walked for ice cream afterwards, but on the way there, glancing up from his phone while he tried to figure out where he knew one of the actresses in the movie from, he caught sight of an old music store, or the vacant lot where the music store used to be. He hadn't heard anything about it closing down even though business had never been booming, but it was stripped and emptied. He stopped in the middle of the sidewalk and stared at the gutted store like it was a sinkhole in the middle of the city and all the good cheer of the evening was slipping over the edge and down to the bottom.

Dante used to love that place. He couldn't account for the blow he felt to his chest at seeing the boards on the door and the sign removed. It wasn't like his brother was ever going to go in there again.

He was gone. He wasn't going anywhere anymore. That was how that worked, the world. It spun on, but people didn't. People got hit by cars and disappeared in the clutch of headlights and screeching brakes. Caitlin noticed he stopped and walked back to him, curious at the intensity of the stare off he was holding with the dead store.

"No one heard him. Dante. His last words. I was thinking about it. He must have been scared or confused. Did he swear? Call for help? Say someone's name? Whatever he said, nobody heard him." He would have called for their mother or a buddy. He felt slighted from beyond the grave at the certainty that it wasn't him that his brother wanted at the end. They were still too far away from each other to reach when it was their last chance. "I was thinking about that."

It was way too heavy for a movie night with the free mint and ticket stub still in his pocket. They should have still been talking about special effects and plot holes, but Caitlin didn't shy away when shit got real. At least part of that was from having to confront too much harsh reality of her own. She lost hard and got up like most people gave up, over and over again.

She took his hand the way she had at Dante's funeral and again at the wake when his family started acting like his family but extra. Extra blame, extra preferential treatment, but this time for a dead son. He didn't feel free to grieve for his brother. He left too fast. Time snatched the opportunity to figure their shit out and get right. He died with loose ends and parents that wouldn't stop looking at Cisco like he _wasn't Dante_.

The lowest moment came when he snapped in the middle of an argument that 'wasn't an argument' (but was!) - the silent kind where no one said what they were thinking but were thinking so freaking loud that it would have knocked a telepath on their ass - and asked if they would have rather it was him that died, that left too soon, without goodbye or a parting smile to freeze on the canvas of their memory until they met again on the other side. His uncle got pissed and chewed him out for stirring stuff up on the hardest day of his mother's life (and Cisco's, but who was counting?), but it was his mom's pause, a heavy hesitation with no words and a million all at once that stuck with him.

She might not have meant it, not really, but in the moment she thought it and wondered. In the space between breaths and cleared eyes, he would have gladly traded places with Dante just so he wouldn't have to feel his mother's indecision in the lowest parts of his self-worth. Then she had sighed and looked away while Tío George ended the discussion with a quick talking-to, punctuated with a _cállate_ when he tried to respond, and Caitlin had held his hand with a much quieter _let's go home_.

The day ended with Caitlin asleep on the couch in his apartment and _Terminator_ in the Blu-ray player, the thought that going back in time to fix things sounded fair if it saved the world from the apocalypse or one person from the twisted knife of grief that was digging into places he never felt before and carving new corners that didn't match with the rest of him, harder and shielded from light. He stared at Dante's contact picture in his phone and wondered if he should delete his number or scroll past it until he got a new phone and tried not to think about how he wasn't plugging Dante's number in with the rest. He stared at his brother's face on the screen and forgave him, hated him, _missed him_ but didn't make a decision, just stared until he fell asleep slumped into the corner with Caitlin's ankle on his thigh and his hand clutched loosely over his heart.

Standing there in front of that dead music store with the dark windows and name removed, ice cream didn't seem urgent anymore. They walked towards home instead.

The next day brought the welcome distraction of meta chaos and drama from their friends in Star City. Apparently, a new villain had crashed the town, making trades with lives and souls. Oliver's friend, Tommy Merlyn, had been resurrected from death with a receipt on Arrow's doorstep that promised to collect something, or most likely someone, in trade. It was awful and wonderful, and Cisco thought about Dante. What he would trade, who. He almost traded everything for an illusion. Caitlin stopped him from making that mistake. There was life and there was death. People who played with that line didn't do it for the person they lost. Cisco could let go. For Dante.

It was a slow crime day in Central City, so Barry hopped over to see if he could lend a hand with Oliver and co. HR was off training Wally. The lab was quiet as he went through data on his computer and Caitlin marked down notes on a legal pad after swatting him twice for trying to spin her wheely chair.

He noticed her remaining package of raisins in the trash can that morning before HR plucked them out and, to his disgust, began eating them.

He rocked his own chair side to side slowly, contemplating the scary ups and downs of their bizarre new normal. "Oliver's best friend is back from the dead. That's heavy. I can't even imagine my best friend being gone. How would I find a replacement rib jabber? I'd have to hold bruising auditions, weed through headshots of hands to judge finger length and dexterity. Headshots? Handshots?"

Caitlin didn't look up from her paper, just poked him in the side.

He jumped. "Ow! See. No one can jab a rib like you."

She glanced at him with that smile she got when he was being particularly ridiculous while she was busy but not busy enough to shut him down immediately. "How about I stick around then?"

She better. He wasn't sure he could make peace and let go if it came to that.

"Aw, for me?"

She teased, "For the innocent people who have the misfortune of trying to watch a movie at a theater with you in it."

That was fair. And noble.

They got ice cream and trash-talked raisins at lunch. The memory of boarded doors and lonely last words was still chasing his lips into muted smiles, but Caitlin's laughter was warm and softened the chill around his heart. He could let go. He could move on. He could make it.

His brother was gone, but he still had his sister.


End file.
